Business out to show email who's the boss

The hatchets are out - email has overstepped its boundaries as a
communications tool and corporate Australia wants it reduced and remodelled.

Just 10 years after it took off in commerce, email as a casual form of
communications has become unmanageable and risky for businesses.

Careless treatment of email has had some recent dramatic outcomes, including
the downfall of Queensland chief magistrate Di Fingleton and insurer HIH.

Now governments are legislating to require all forms of electronic
communication to be strictly stored and archived in ways similar to paper-based
communications.

The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has quadrupled its number of
audit teams since February this year, and two Australian banks are to be audited
in August and September.

"It's become the lawyer's best friend," says John Brand, vice-president of
technical research services for META Group.

At the same time, says Ken Dulaney, analyst at Gartner, "the use of email is
becoming more and more critical to every enterprise today".

"They cannot run their business without it," Dulaney says. "It covers
communication within the enterprise as well as important communication outside
of the enterprises to customers and suppliers."

Some organisations, which don't wish to go public for competitive reasons,
are taking steps to internally remodel their email.

"We are seeing the first evolutionary steps of email in a new form," Brand
says. "Companies are recognising that they need more structure and control
around it."

Many companies are imposing procedures around email to manage it better.
"There is a rich set of procedural things that could be done, such as helping
people understand what copying everyone on an email does to enterprise
productivity," Dulaney says.

†Brand says companies are beginning to transform email into something
more akin to a notification tool. Early changes involve generating form-based
emails via portals, to provide information or give instructions. For example, an
email could be linked to a webpage that generates a form that is sent between
team members. Communication could be contained within the form and later
automatically stored.

Another way is to merge communications such as instant messaging with
email.

"That reduces the reliance on email, which is an unmanaged environment, for
situations such as, say, a marketing campaign, which generates a lot of ad hoc
information," Brand says.

"It starts to converge more with managed environments and you start to have
email as a decision-making tool."

Brand says the most effective organisations are now blending transactional
systems such as financial management systems with systems that include instant
messaging and online conferencing. He cites Ford in the US and, in Australia,
most of the big online retailers and a handful of smaller manufacturing
organisations.

Brand also cites a global financial institution - that he refuses to name -
that initiated a system out of Australia, which merged records management
documents with email to handle its entire loan approval process.

Previously, nobody had a good picture of the risk and none of the information
was centralised.

The users discovered that once they created a virtual team space with all of
the processes documented they could do new tasks such as credit checking. Time
spent on loan approvals was cut by 30 per cent.

"The first steps in the evolution of email are being driven by the blurring
between email and processes," Brand says.

This initiative is being picked by some vendors such as Microsoft with its
information gathering application InfoPath, which allows users to create simple
form-based processes that connect into other platforms such as Oracle Financials
or SAP.

Gartner's Dulaney says that although there are some technical developments to
support this move, the two biggest commercial email sellers, IBM and Microsoft,
"don't want to do too much in this area because they see it as an incursion on
intellectual freedom".

Other developments are expected to occur outside of the user's sphere.

Storage and content management companies are developing automated systems
that bring all of the email together to ensure that there's no duplication and
access them readily when they're called up.

Gerry Lahiffe, strategic accounts channel manager for Legato, says automating
storage management is the key to storing email; not only must it be archived
efficiently but also quickly retrieved. He cites an example of five Wall Street
firms - Goldman Sachs, Salomon Smith Barney, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank
Securities Inc and Piper Jaffray Inc - that were fined a total of $8.25 million
last year after failing to produce email relevant to a suit in time.

Market analysts estimate it will be roughly four years before email emerges
from its current gestation into its new form. "What we'll tend to see is that
the best-performing organisations will fix internally first, then go out to
their business partners," Brand says.

Dulaney adds: "The changes are occurring now. But when do I see that email
becomes 20 per cent more productive than it is now through a combination of
improvements? About four or five years."

You've got (too much) mail

The University of NSW is no stranger to email overload: it handles about
15,000 an hour, rising to 70,000 an hour when it is being spammed.

"The main problem is the increasing load of mail and its use for purposes
that were not intended, like attachments of home-movie files," says
communications operations manager for the enterprise infrastructure unit, Peter
Ivanov.

To address this, the unit has imposed a 20MB limit on mail items and limited
the size of mailboxes in terms of bytes consumed. These are adjusted if
necessary - for a person running a conference, for example.

It also runs all emails through filtering servers that use rule sets to block
mail, remove viruses and attempt to reduce the amount of spam.

Even so, Ivanov says it is difficult to fully assess an email until it is at
least partially opened. He tries to automate everything, to keep administration
to a minimum, and ensure the system is robust so that email is not interrupted
if there is a failure.

"It's an extremely important resource - people dependon it," he says.

The unit is not required to archive emails, and legal compliance is the
responsibility of the end user.

By contrast, law firm Clayton Utz keeps every email that passes through its
mail server. Its national manager for infrastructure services, Ray Moore, says
this is one of five key points of the firm's email management.

It also uses archiving processes built into the software for easy retrieval
and to provide historical records.

Like the university, it secures its system with good disaster-recovery
policies and eliminates unnecessary email with software gateways and filters.
Automation, too, is critical.

To eliminate multiple copies of the same email, "we use software that allows
us to keep single-instance records to reduce storage space", Moore says.

Elsewhere, email overload is being dealt with in increasingly creative ways.
AMP Financial Services, for example, experimented with a "no-email day" to
highlight alternative forms of communication. However, despite its success, the
experiment has not been repeated.